Defying
the Sanctions: A Flight to Iraq

January 2001

Upon disembarking from the Olympic Airways
plane that brought me to Iraq in November 2000, I could see some of
the effects of the Western-imposed sanctions. What was once a busy international
airport is now a desolate strip. Two lonely planes sit as if abandoned
on the vast tarmac. There are no airport personnel to speak of, no baggage
carts or utility vehicles, not even any visible security. On a wall
inside the empty terminal is a handmade sign in Arabic and imperfect
English; it reads: “Down USA.” A large portrait of Saddam Hussein gazes
down upon us. His image can be found along the road to the city, in
the hotel, and on various public buildings.

I am part of an international delegation
of Greeks, Britons, Canadians, and Americans. Included are journalists,
peace advocates, and members of the Greek parliament. Margarita Papandreou,
former first lady of Greece and devoted political activist, leads the
group. It is an especially moving moment for her. It has been her dream
for ten years to be able to fly directly to Baghdad. And ours is the
first flight to Iraq by a state-owned commercial airline from the West
in defiance of US/UN sanctions. The Iraqi officials who greet us do
not try to hide how pleased they are about our arrival. “Your presence
is a statement against the inhuman means used against us. Iraq is a
prosperous country capable of fulfilling the basic needs of the people
but we are being prevented from doing so by the UN sanctions,” one of
them says. “Feel free to go anywhere and speak to anyone.”

Killing Iraq

Most Americans do not know that Saddam
Hussein was put into power by a CIA-engineered coup to stop the Iraqi
revolution—which he did by massacring the communists and the left-wing
of his own Baath party. But in time Saddam proved to be a disappointment
to his mentors in Washington. Instead of becoming the comprador ruler
who opened his country to free-market capital penetration on terms that
were thoroughly favorable to Western investors, he devoted a substantial
portion of Iraq's export earnings to human services and economic development.
In 1972, Iraq nationalized its oil industry, and was immediately denounced
by US leaders as a “terrorist” nation.

Before the six weeks of air attacks
known as the Gulf War (which ended in February 1991), Iraq’s standard
of living was the highest in the Middle East. Iraqis enjoyed free medical
care and free education. Literacy had reached about 80 percent. Most
Iraqi youth were educated up through secondary school. University students
of both genders received scholarships to study at home and abroad. In
the eyes of Western leaders, Saddam was that penultimate evil, an economic
nationalist, little better than a communist. He would have to be taught
a lesson. His country needed to be bombed back into the Third World
from which it was emerging.

The high explosive tonnage delivered
upon Iraq during the Gulf War was more than twice the combined Allied
air offensive of World War II. Within the first few days of bombing,
there was no running water in the country. More than 90 percent of Iraq's
electrical capacity was destroyed. Its telecommunication systems, including
television and radio stations, were demolished, as were its flood control,
irrigation, sewage treatment, water purification, and hydroelectic systems.
Farm herds and poultry farms suffered heavy losses. US planes burned
wheat and grain fields with incendiary bombs, and hit hundreds of schools,
hospitals, rail stations, bus stations, air-raid shelters, mosques,
and historic sites. Factories that produced textiles, cement, chlorine,
petrochemicals, and phosphate were hit repeatedly. So were the refineries,
pipelines, and storage tanks of Iraq's oil industry. Iraqi civilians
and soldiers fleeing Kuwait were slaughtered by the thousands on what
became known as the “Highway of Death.” Also massacred were Iraqi soldiers
who tried to surrender to US forces on a number of occasions. In all,
some 200,000 Iraqis were killed in those six weeks. Nearly all US planes,
Ramsey Clark notes, “employed laser-guided depleted-uranium missiles,
leaving 900 tons of radioactive waste spread over much of Iraq with
no concern for the consequences to future life.”

Our delegation got a grim glimpse of
the war’s aftermath. We visited the Al-Amerya bomb shelter where over
four hundred civilians, mostly women and children were incinerated by
two US missiles. Blackened ossified body parts, including a child’s
hand can still be seen melded into the ceiling. Along one wall is the
irradiated shadow of a woman holding a baby in her arms, a ghoulish
fresco created by the heat blast of the missiles. The shadow of another
figure can be seen on the cement floor. The shelter has been made into
a shrine, with candles, plastic flowers, and pictures of the victims.
The guide notes that US reconnaissance saw civilians using the shelter
on a nightly basis during the early days of the bombing, yet it was
still chosen as a target.

In the ten years of “peace” since February
1991, an additional 400 tons of explosives have been dropped on Iraq,
three hundred people have been killed and many hundreds wounded. The
United States and United Kingdom, with the participation of France,
imposed a no-fly zone over the northern region of the country, ostensibly
to protect the Kurds. This newly found humanitarian concern did not
extend to the Kurds residing on the Turkish side of the border. The
next year, another no-fly zone was imposed in the south, reputedly to
protect Shiite settlements, effectively dividing the country into three
parts. By 1998, the French had withdrawn from both zones, but US and
British air attacks on military and civilian targets have continued
almost on a daily basis, including strafing raids against Iraqi agricultural
developments. Baghdad’s repeated protests to the United Nations have
gone unheeded. Since 1998, three members of the Security Council—Russia,
China, and France; and various nonpermanent members have condemned the
raids as illegal and unauthorized by the Security Council.

To drive the point home to us, on the
second day of our visit, US warplanes fired four missiles at the village
of Hmaidi in the southern province of Basra, one of which struck the
Ali Al-Hayaini school, wounding four children and three teachers. Several
homes were also hit.

Picking Up the Pieces

Despite the years of bombings and the
even greater toll on human life taken by the sanctions, visitors to
Baghdad do not see a city in ruins. Much of the wreckage has been cleared
away, much has been repaired. In our hotel there is running water throughout
the day, hot water in the morning. Various streets in Baghdad are lined
with little stores, surprisingly well-stocked with household appliances,
hardware goods, furniture, and clothes (much of which has a second-hand
look).

We see no derelicts or homeless people
on the streets of Baghdad, no prostitutes or ragged bands of abandoned
children, though there are occasional youngsters eager to shine shoes
or solicit spare change. But even they seem to be well-fed and decently
clothed. Obviously, despite all the destruction wrought by the sanctions,
Iraq still has not undergone sufficient free-market “structural adjustment.”

A British member of our delegation who
has made more than a dozen trips to Iraq over the past decade sees some
changes for the better. A few years ago, the cars all looked like “death
traps”; tires were patched beyond recognition, windows were cracked,
and doors were falling off the hinges, she tells me. Now the Iraqis
seem to have procured vehicles that are in better repair. In addition,
large swaths of the city used to be shrouded in complete darkness; now
there are lights just about everywhere, though mostly on the dim side.
There are more shops with more goods, “although 70 percent of the people
can’t buy anything.” Still, “people used to feel hopelessly isolated
and now there seems to be more hope and better morale,” she concludes.
The Silent Cries of Children

Not everyone shows better morale. It
is said that the most depressed officials in Iraq can be found in the
Ministry of Health, not surprisingly given the tragedies they confront.
Aside from the 200,000 Iraqis slaughtered during the Gulf War, an additional
1.5 million civilians have died since 1991 as a result of the sanctions,
according to UNICEF reports and the Red Cross, many from what normally
would be treatable and curable illnesses. Of these victims, 600,000
are children under 5 years of age. Maternal mortality rates have more
than doubled, and 70 percent of Iraqi women suffer from anemia. Given
the tons of depleted uranium used during the Allied attacks, cancer
rates have skyrocketed: the childhood leukemia rate is now the highest
in the world. Most of the leukemia increase is in southern Iraq where
the bombing was heaviest.

We visit a children’s hospital in Baghdad.
The familiar sight of skeletal-looking infants, racked with diseases
that make it impossible for them to retain or digest nutrients are no
longer evident. Such dying children still can be found in parts of Iraq
but not at this hospital. Instead we encounter something equally ominous:
children suffering from acute forms of multiple malignancies. Shrouded
mothers stand by the beds like mournful sentinels, their eyes filled
with unspoken grief. The journalists, photographers, and TV crews in
our delegation descend upon these sad people, clicking and flashing
away with that intrusive irreverence that is the press’s modus operandi.
A mother weeps quietly against the wall. One of the doomed children
smiles up at us—which almost causes me to start weeping.

Things are getting worse, a doctor tells
us; more and more children are turning up with leukemia. The medical
staff is overwhelmed. One doctor says he sees three hundred patients
in three hours: “We cannot treat them properly.” Some of the hospital
rooms are lined with incubators that contain what look like premature
births. These turn out to be infants who are the products of depleted
uranium, born with serious deformities and malfunctions, urgently in
need of surgical intervention. The hospital lacks the special instruments
needed to operate on infants, not to mention ordinary medications, anesthetics,
antibiotics, bandages, intravenous sets, and diagnostic equipment. Iraq's
excellent national health care system, with its universal coverage,
is now in shambles because of the embargo.

Things were supposed to get better when
the sanctions were eased in 1996, allowing Iraq to make “oil for food”
sales. Since then, $32 billion in oil was sold abroad but only $8 billion
worth of materials has reached Iraq, less than $5 or $6 a month per
person. Another $10 billion has been allocated for “war compensation,”
in effect forcing the Iraqis to pay the costs incurred by the UN aggressors
when destroying Iraq. Another $11 billion in cash sits in Western banks.
Worse still, many essential things needed to rebuild the infrastructure—including
the technological, medical, educational, communicational, and industrial
systems of the nation—are still not available. Under the deleterious
“dual use” doctrine, many vital commodities and materials needed for
humanitarian and civilian purposes are banned because they conceivably
could also be used by the military: computers, components for electrical
transmitters and water pumps, even glycerin tablets needed for heart
ailments. (It would take millions of glycerin tablets mixed with nitrogen
to make one small explosive.)

The Foreign Minister Speaks

Iraq’s Minister of Foreign Affairs,
Tariq Aziz, a calm congenial man, meets with our delegation. In clear
and precise English, he makes the following points: Before 1990, the
United Nations had placed sanctions upon only a few nations, such as
Rhodesia and South Africa, on a voluntary basis. “It was left to the
countries themselves and the world to implement those sanctions or not
implement them.” Hence the effects were mild. But since 1990,US leaders
with their so-called New World Order have imposed the severest embargo,
“encircling Iraq with warships and airplanes that prevent even ordinary
trips and ordinary cargoes.” As with the sanctions against Yugoslavia,
the minister notes, this policy has created a lot of suffering. “Therefore,
when we say that this embargo is an international issue, it’s not just
anti-American propaganda. It’s the truth. And it is quit horrid.” The
collapse of the Soviet Union has created a different international scene,
he adds. With the end of the Cold War, “a new hot war and warm war”
has been imposed on many nations, with Iraq as a prime target.

In spite of all the reports made by
United Nations agencies themselves “informing the Security Council about
the sufferings of the Iraqi people, and the deaths of so many children,
and the deterioration of the Iraqi economy,” Aziz reminds us, there
is no likelihood of any change in UN policy on sanctions because of
the Security Council veto wielded by the United States and Britain.
Still the people of Iraq have not been merely passive victims. They
have “refused to yield to American pressure and American blackmail.”
In addition, there is “the will of other peoples, the free women and
men in this world” who refuse to support injustice and imperialism.
After ten years, US propaganda “is wearing thin,” and “a lot of facts
have become known to the peoples of the world” bringing a dramatic increase
in support for Iraq—as measured by the growing number of air flights
from various nations in defiance of the sanctions. Not only Iraq but
its trading partners have sustained substantial commercial losses because
of the ten-year embargo. In 2000, more than 1,500 international companies
from forty-five countries participated in the Iraqi trade fair. So,
for both moral and legitimate commercial reasons, “the embargo is beginning
to crack.”

Ten years ago, concludes Aziz, we were
told: history is over; from now on we will live according to the diktat
of US leaders in a Pax Americana. And those who do not accept this are
“rogue nations.” But US leaders are beginning to realize “that this
new imperialism is not working. . . . Despite all its power, the United
States is not God. It's not the Almighty. It’s an imperialist force.”
And “when a nation succeeds in refusing the dictate of imperialists,
[and] succeeds in preserving its sovereignty, and its independence and
dignity, that is an achievement.” Aziz’s closing plea was that we not
rely on “the manipulated media” of the United States, Britain and Canada.
“One of the basic human rights is that you have the right to make your
own judgment, not to buy judgments made by others that might not be
honest and true. So I hope that you will use this short visit to know
what is going on in this country and what the realities are.”

The “Realities”

On the closing day of our trip, members
of our delegation lay plans to carry on the battle against sanctions.
These include: lobbying the UN Compensation Committee, which refuses
to release the $11 billion in Iraqi oil-for-food earnings; joining with
Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and other NGOs to
lobby the UN Security Council; lobbying the UN Human Rights Commission
in Geneva and the parliament of the European Union; lobbying elected
representatives and religious leaders in various countries; and sending
messages through the Internet.

The sanctions wall is not about to crumble
but it is showing cracks. In 1998 Scott Ritter, chief UN weapons inspector
in Iraq since 1991, resigned and accused the US government of undercutting
UN weapons inspectors. Meanwhile US leaders and the press continued
to portray Iraq as bent on nuclear aggression, despite the fact that
Baghdad cooperated fully with UN inspectors who scoured the country
in a vain search for weapons of mass destruction or the capacity to
build them.

Also in 1998, Denis Halliday, UN Assistant
Secretary General and Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, resigned in
protest of what the sanctions were doing to that country. In early 2000,
Hans von Sponeck, UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq and Jutta Burghart,
head of UN World Food Program in Baghdad, resigned in protest of the
sanctions.

Still, the State Department and the
US media continue to blame Saddam, not the sanctions, for the misery
endured by the Iraqi people. The claim that sanctions hurt ordinary
Iraqis “is outweighed by the sad truth that Saddam Hussein is determined
to keep portions of his population in poverty,” intones a Washington
Post editorial reprinted in the International Herald Tribune (November
14, 2000). The Iraqi leader, the Post assures us, is a “warmongering
dictator” who needs to be contained by a still more severe application
of sanctions. Upon being selected as the new US Secretary of State in
December 2000, General Colin Powell echoed this position, announcing
that he would strive to “reenergize” the sanctions against Iraq.

The Iraqi leadership could turn US policy
completely around by uttering just two magic words: “free market.” All
they would have to do is invite the IMF and World Bank into Iraq, eliminate
free education and free medical care, abolish the minimal food ration
that goes to every Iraqi, abolish the housing subsidies and transportation
subsidies, and hand over the country’s oil industry to the corporate
cartels. To lift the sanctions, Iraq must surrender to the tender mercies
of the free-market paradise as Yugoslavia has recently done under the
newly minted, Western-sponsored president, Kostunica, and as so many
other nations have done. Until then, Iraq will continue to be designated
a “rogue nation” by those policymakers in Washington who themselves
are the meanest profit-driven, power-mongering rogues on earth.